I will be hitting you soon with a great series about the use of metaphors and examples to explain project management concepts.

To warm you up, my column at TechTarget: Estimating actual project progress.

"I wish that everyone who is involved in projects finally gets the fact that just spending hours or money has nothing to do with actually making progress."

"I have thought about it for a while, and I finally come up with a way to explain this to managers. I tried shouting. I tried slapping. But I settled for something they recognize, an image they see the entire day during work hours (when they are "researching on the Internet"): The download progress bar."

A Gantt chart groups human resources with specific tasks. Further, it allows the project manager to identify dependencies between tasks, laying out the entire project in a timeline fashion. People championing the Gantt chart will tell you that it can be difficult or impossible for the project manager to correctly identify the critical path without one. They say it can help a project manager decide which employees to put on which teams.

Photography by JCardinal.

Many people voice the concern that the format of the Gantt chart is too limiting. Edward Tufte notes how most Gantt charts for larger projects can easily turn into grid prisons, where important data is easily lost in a sea of sparse task descriptions. No real actionable To-Do lists. No substance. Just a grid prison that does more to demotivate a team than inspire it.

That's not the kind of information you want your team to be staring at from day-to-day. That's not in your face information! We live in a time where development teams use Continuous Integration systems to communicate Build Status Using Lava Lamps.
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Today I got an email from Ken Thompson about his SwarmTeam project. I have talked to the guy earlier this year, and his story is amazing.

You really have to check it out… and imagine your project swarm team

One of the biggest challenges facing those who promote media, brands, communities or causes is how to meaningfully engage with mobile online groups in a way which, instead of turning them off, turns them into ambassadors and champions. Thats where Swarmteams comes in - the Community Engagement Tool inspired by nature.

Check out the 4-minute video which outlines the 7 simple steps for engagement marketing using Swarmteams.

A while ago I asked a group of you, my readers, my beloved, loyal readers, "If you have 10 minutes, how do you judge a project manager?" I have used the answers to that question for my monthly column at TechTarget… (you might have to register, but its free, and you have access to a lot of other interesting stuff).

The best summary of the responses is given by this statement: "If they just use jargon from the PMBok, I put them on the lower end of the scale. If they talk about the importance of stakeholders and people in general I put them on the high end of the scale. The PMBok hardly covers stakeholders, so they must have been in the trenches."

Bill Dow and Bruce Taylor have worked four years to bring us the "Project Management Communications Bible". This book about the most important aspect of Project Management will be available in the first quarter of 2008 and will contain over 1200 pages! Wow. I had a great chat with both of them about their upcoming book, the past and future of Project Management, and a lot of other great topics.

How To Write 1200+ Pages…

Bas: There was one thing that amazed me a lot, how do you write 1,200 pages about project management communication?

Bill: It was actually very easy. We actually had to cut down on some of the tools because we started out with 107 communication tools, and if you do an average of about five pages per tool, and the way weve written the book - we have a section that shows how the tools are used on the nine Project Management Institute knowledge areas. And each tool we felt would cover basically the scope, the planning and that type of thing.
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Perhaps it is a sign I have too much time on my hands, or I should really get a good hobby… but … I spent some time going through my mailbox with all my mails from one of my last projects and came up with the following theory…

Photography by Mzelle Biscotte.

The carbon copy (cc) function in mail is only used to send people a copy of the mail if:

a) the sender is not sure about the content, and hopes a cc-er will check it;

b) the sender is not authorized about a certain aspect and uses the cc to cover his butt.

With increasing pressure on a project team, you will find more cc-recipients in the mails. People don't have the time to check the content or get all the agreements needed, so they resolve to cc.

With increasing pressure, people have less time to read their mail, so they will skip all the mails that they received by carbon copy as it is not primary addressed to them.

See the paradox?

Well, it is just a theory.